But
there was also something deeper in it than this. There was mixed with it
the natural dread in the political diviner of the political logician,--in
the empirical, of the theoretic statesman. Burke, confounding the idea of
society with the form of it then existing, would have preserved that as
the only specific against anarchy. Rousseau, assuming that society as it
then existed was but another name for anarchy, would have reconstituted
it on an ideal basis. The one has left behind him some of the profoundest
aphorisms of political wisdom; the other, some of the clearest principles
of political science. The one, clinging to Divine right, found in the
fact that things were, a reason that they ought to be; the other, aiming
to solve the problem of the Divine order, would deduce from that
abstraction alone the claim of anything to be at all. There seems a mere
oppugnancy of nature between the two, and yet both were, in different
ways, the dupes of their own imaginations.
Now let us hear the opinion of a philosopher who _was_ a bear, whether
bears be philosophers or not. Boswell had a genuine relish for what was
superior in any way, from genius to claret, and of course he did not let
Rousseau escape him. "One evening at the Mitre, Johnson said
sarcastically to me, 'It seems, sir, you have kept very good company
abroad,--Rousseau and Wilkes!' I answered with a smile, 'My dear sir, you
don't call Rousseau bad company; do you really think _him_ a bad man?'
Johnson: 'Sir, if you are talking jestingly of this, I don't talk with
you.
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